Laying out pages in CSS has always seemed a more complicated process than it needs to be. So here’s some great news: there are fresh specs that will make creating layouts a much simpler task for web designers.

The major browsers, with the help of bodies such as the W3C, are starting to provide standards and implementations for a variety of new layout options that we can begin using today. For example, the W3C currently considers CSS3 Multicolumn Layout Module a Candidate Recommendation. Basically this means it’s at the point where the W3C is comfortable with browsers implementing it as a feature.

01. Vendor prefixes

Other specs haven’t yet attained Candidate Recommendation status – but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. Today, the major browsers use vendor prefixes to indicate that a particular spec is an implementation that may possibly change and the expectation is that the vendor prefix will be removed once the spec and implementation are stable. Jonathan Snook describes vendor prefixes as doing two things:

They enable browser developers to test new functionality without fear of a changing spec.

They warn web developers that things are in flux.

While there is some controversy over the existence of vendor prefixes they represent a good opportunity to use features early in the standards process – although they need to be used wisely. Here we’ll be looking at a spectrum of layout properties, ranging from established to cutting edge. True, you may not be implementing all of these in production – but it’s certainly useful to know what’s coming over the horizon.

02. Multi-column

For our first layout feature, we’ll start with something simple, the CSS Multi-column Layout Module. (For our sanity, let’s just call it Multi-column.) As you can guess, this enables us to lay out columns on a web page without having to think about positioning and floats.

Also, it’s nice to have a feature that will create an appropriate number of columns based on the size of the display. For example, if you want to have a selector with a column-width of 13 ems (you could use pixels as well) and have the browser display as many columns as space allows, you can do that:

#mcexample { column-width: 13ems; }

Yes, it’s that simple! You can also define a fixed number of columns, although the column widths will be evenly distributed based on the width.

#mcexample { column-count: 3; }

If you want to exert finer control over your columns, that’s possible too. For example, you could define the number of columns, their width, the rules between columns and their styles.

One of the great things about Multi-column is how it auto-magically flows the content for you so you don’t have to do the maths or finalise word counts just to make everything line up!

Be careful when using Multi-column, though, because you don’t want to create a situation where someone visiting your site needs to continually scroll up and down the page because of long-height columns.

Almost all current desktop browsers and mobile browsers support Multicolumn (for Internet Explorer, you need to use the IE10 Platform Preview at this time). One of the quickest ways to find browser support for a feature is to go to caniuse.com and use the search to find what main desktop and mobile browsers support the feature you are looking for. Remember, although a feature may be supported, it may require a vendor prefix or the browser may not include every item in the spec – so test, test, test!

03. Flexbox

The CSS Flexible Box Layout Module is located at w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox. For our purposes, we will refer to it by its commonly used nickname, Flexbox.

Flexbox enables you to lay out the children of a box vertically or horizontally and provide spacing requirements for those children (hence, flexible).

For example, to create a Flexbox in Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview, we can use the display property and set it to use Flexbox:

#fbexample { display: -ms-box; background: black; }

We can also set an orientation for the layout of the child elements by using the vendor prefix for Internet Explorer (typically starting with –ms-box):

#fbexample { display: -ms-box; -ms-box-orient: horizontal; }

Flexbox gives us the ability to orient the child elements in a variety of ways: left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top. We may wish to declare the direction of the children in a way that’s perpendicular to the layout axis based on the orientation.

This could mean each child element centred between the edges of a parent element, so space above and below is evenly distributed for each child element.

Another property we can use is the box-pack, which defines how excess space is distributed between child elements. For example, we could have our first child element start at the edge of the parent element along the layout axis direction:

But what if we have more child elements than will fit and we don’t really want them squeezed to a size that’s not useful? Well, we can actually tell the browser to go ahead and wrap the child elements using box-lines:

To define the flexibility of a child element, we can set its box-flex property to 0, which means it is not flexible, or a number like 1 or 2, which defines how much of a fraction of space it gets.

With Flexbox applied to an element, it’s easy to lay out child elements in a variety of ways. Here we see a horizontal layout and one with wrapping enabled

For example, if we have three child elements where child1 has value of 0, child2 has a value of 1 and child3 has a value of 2, child1 would remain the same size because it isn’t flexible, child2 would get 1/3 of the available space shared with child3 – which would get 2/3 of the available space. The best part is, you don’t have to do the maths yourself because the browser does it for you!

Now if you have a keen eye, you may have looked at the latest spec and realised that some of the properties above don’t look exactly right. Right now Flexbox is considered a Working Draft by the W3C, which means it’s early in the standards cycle. So as a work in progress, it’s pretty safe to assume it will change. In fact, here are the dates of recent versions of the spec:

November 29, 2011

March 22, 2011

July 23, 2009

If you look at caniuse.com and search for the Flexible Box Layout Module, you’ll see that with vendor prefixes you can use Flexbox as above. But it turns out that some of the browsers’ implementations follow the 2009 spec (like the examples above) instead of the latest one from November 2011. This is why it is always important to not just assume that ‘it works’ because a browser vendor said so, but to do some prototypes to understand what the support actually is.

The good news is that it’s not that difficult to make the switch to the updated spec. So for example, declaring an element to be a Flexbox is now:

#fbexample { display: -ms-flexbox; /* Instead of &ndash;ms-box */ }

Again, the spec is in the midst of changing since it’s a working draft, but don’t let it keep you from trying it out with the appropriate vendor prefixes.

04. Grid Layout

Historically, IE has been considered the laggard of desktop browsers in terms of standards innovation. But with newer versions in the pipeline, IE is starting to challenge this. For example, in the latest IE10 Platform Preview, support was introduced for CSS Grid Layout. The spec at w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout was submitted by Microsoft to the W3C CSS Working Group last April, and at time of writing, Internet Explorer 10 is the only browser that implements it.

With Grid Layout, we can stop fussing around with positioning and floats and instead easily lay out tables using rows and columns

Grid layout is pretty fundamental even beyond web design, so it’s just a matter of time before all browsers begin supporting it. And this will hopefully end the tyranny of HTML table elements being used for layout! The spec enables us to lay out our page using rows and columns and define how the content will span across individual rows and cells while keeping our content separate from the layout. First, we need to define our grid by using a vendor prefix:

Or maybe we want to align elements using grid-row-align or grid-column-align. These properties enable you to define whether the content is centred within the row/column, or you can even define its alignment horizontally or vertically. For example, to centre within a column, you’d do the following:

In the bad old days, HTML table-based layouts caused trouble because individual cells tended to be defined by their order in the markup, which made things brittle. But with Grid Layout we can use features such as Media Queries to apply different styling to our grid depending on device width, height and orientation.

05. Conclusion

If you’re more of a visual person, I’d recommend that you check out Markus Mielke’s presentation. This discusses both layout features covered in this article and others, and how they can be used together in an app.

In this article, we’ve covered features implemented in all browsers, and some that are just emerging. It may feel as if some of the latter are not ready for use in production sites, and in some cases you may be right. But as designers we should be aware of what they are and how they work because, let’s face it, all the CSS features we use every day started off with a spec and implementation.

Thomas Lewis is a technical evangelist at Microsoft focused on HTML5 and the web designer/developer community: asimplepixel.tumblr.com